Native American Study

The 2nd and 4th nine-week periods are going to "history-heavy". I really enjoy history. My dad was a history buff and would teach us all about military history. I remember going to museums, observing artifacts, wondering what the people who used them might be like. 

If you don't have a reason to study history, I believe it simply becomes facts and dates to remember. But, history has context. It involves different perspectives, conflict, progress, etc. And sometimes, it has bias, which we will work carefully at detecting. Our class will study history in an effort to understand how/why things are the way they are today.

We began with Native Americans. Before we began the unit, the students wrote down lists of things they thought they already knew about Native Americans, where they got that information from, and then drew a picture of what they thought a Native American looked like.

Then, we looked through 20 trade books about Native Americans and came up with some facts. We talked about stereotypes; just because we found a fact about one Native American tribe did not necessarily mean it applied to all tribes. Some examples of facts we found were some Native Americans hunted, while others planted; Native Americans had different languages and dialects; and, not all Native Americans lived in tepees. 

After a few days of reading about Native Americans and discussing new information, we drew what we thought Native Americans looked like today.

We looked at the drawings as a class and came up with a list of observations:
"Most drawings had them wearing everyday clothes."
"They were living in regular homes."

This led to a discussion about why the Native Americans had changed their clothes and homes.
"Maybe we made them change."
"Maybe they thought our clothes and homes were better."
"We thought they would want the change."
"Since they were living in our country, they changed."

Quotes like this are so important to what we do in the classroom. In order to understand another perspective, you have to understand your own.

We started diving more into the relations between early North American settlers and the Native American tribes and we learned that there were major conflicts on land (Native Americans did not believe you could own land, but Europeans believed that owning land gave you wealth and power), religion (even though some settlers left England because of persecution about their beliefs, they tried to force the Native Americans to convert to their religion), disease (smallpox), and misunderstandings/battles.

Then, we talked about what the American government did to remove Native Americans from the land they inhabited. The shocking thing about this is that we looked in the index of our textbook and the Trail of Tears or the Indian Removal Act of 1830 were nowhere to be found. Dean found a passage about Andrew Jackson, the President who ordered the Native Americans to leave, and it only mentioned the positive things that he had done.

We looked through the textbook and put post-it notes on all the pages that had information about Native Americans and found that the first 5th of the book had information about Native Americans, but the remaining 4/5 had no information about Native Americans at all. It was like they had vanished without any explanation as to why.

We talked about why this might be. One student said, "Maybe they don't want us to feel bad because we're living where they once did." It's an interesting thought. There is that awkward balance between learning from the atrocities toward Native Americans in the past, and knowing that I'm happy living in Columbia where Native Americans tribes used to live.

On Thursday, the students will write reflections on what they learned or are thinking about in regards to our Native American study. I'll be interested in reading what they have to say.